As teased over the weekend, Mercy Virtual, the telehealth division of Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy Health System, is putting the finishing touches on what it calls the world’s first virtual care center, ahead of the planned June 1 opening.
The $50 million, 120,000-square-foot facility will serve as the nerve center for all of Mercy’s nearly 80 telehealth programs, including what is being called the largest single-hub eICU in America. It took a year to build, though the planning goes back to at least 2011.
Telehealth “stops the variation in care delivery,” Mercy Virtual Executive Medical Director Dr. Tom Hale told MedCity News at this week’s American Telemedicine Association conference in Los Angeles. The virtual care center is intended to reduce variation by centralizing work processes, creating interoperability and making sure that communication of information fits into clinician workflows, Hale explained.
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“Done separately and in silos, [telehealth] becomes almost a distraction,” Hale said.”You need to centralize processes using a computer to do the hard work for you, with clinical decision support,” he explained.
“If any piece is missing, it falls apart.”
For example, a quarter of all hospitalized patients typically are at risk for sepsis at any given time. “Mortality is as high as 50-60 percent when you go into septic shock,” Hale said.
Mercy now scans its Epic Systems electronic health record to look for any of more than 800 potential warning signs for sepsis, then alerts physicians to take action to prevent infection. A 10-month pilot telesepsis program in 2011-12 at Mercy’s flagship Chesterfield hospital, near St. Louis, cut mortality from septic shock from 46.7 percent to 18.5 percent and reduced sepsis-related ICU length of stay from 8 to just 3.4 days.
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Mercy later expanded telesepsis to four other hospitals in Missouri, Oklahoma and Arkansas, with similar success, according to a fact sheet the organization distributed. With the opening of the virtual care center, Mercy will implement this service system-wide.
“Our vision is to have networked virtual care centers all over the country,” Hale said, and not just operated by Mercy. “This is not a business model. This is a clinical model.”
In some ways, the virtual care center is “theater,” Hale said. “People need to see it” so they can understand the clinical advantages of telehealth to increase patient access to care and reduce variation. Hale said he expects clinicians from within and outside of Mercy, as well as legislators and community leaders, to tour the facility.
